IF Only: Birdland And The XYZZY Awards

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Earlier this year, the interactive fiction community held its annual XYZZY awards to celebrate the best interactive fiction pieces (and a few types of technical work) from 2015. The XYZZYs are one of the longest-running awards in gaming, celebrated every year since 1997, when they honored the best IF games of 1996. This year one game dominated the awards, with good reason: Birdland.

The XYZZY Awards are idiosyncratic. There is the awards ceremony, held on an all-text mud, that tends to run two to three hours. This is exactly long enough that people attending who aren’t already familiar with said mud are getting the hang of the commands and etiquette right about when it’s time to log out. There’s the name, which comes from the magic word XYZZY from Advent, and is incomprehensible other than as an in-joke. This raises the challenge level of explaining to your non-interactive-fiction friends what the heck you just won.

Then there’s the spectrum of award categories. Best Use of Innovation tends to make the most sense if you’re already avidly following what the IF community currently considers cutting-edge. Best Use of Multimedia means that the game includes any graphics or music or non-text aspect at all. At least the confusing Best Use of Medium award was retired a few years ago. No one could agree on what it really meant, and the psychic jokes were getting old.

Once upon a time, the XYZZYs sent out physical medals to the winners, deeply stamped with a brass lantern on one side. That practice stopped in the early 2000s. Since then, they’ve offered merely the Respect of One’s Peers, and (lately) a detailed analytical write-up of all the nominees. Analysis for 2015 nominees isn’t available yet, but you can see what was written about the 2014 games here.

The XYZZYs honoring 2015 were pretty hotly contested. The general consensus is that 2015 was an amazing year for interactive fiction, featuring strong, varied work by new and returning authors, multiple new venues for paid IF, and a sense of growing excitement and energy. There have been some years when it felt like a challenge to fill out the more specific categories — when there just weren’t enough great puzzle games to make a compelling Best Puzzle slate, for instance — but this year there was an excess of plausible contenders in most areas. There were so many plausible nearly-nominated games that the XYZZY Awards site took the unprecedented step of publishing a list of runners-up.

Despite this plentiful and superb competition, one game pulled a Hamilton on the ceremony: Brendan Patrick Hennessy’s sizable Twine Birdland, which took Best Game, Best Writing, Best Story, Best Non-Player Characters, Best Individual Non-Player Character, and Best Individual Player Character. (If you’re wondering about the difference between Best Writing and Best Story, traditionally Writing tends to focus on prose quality and Story on plot, though it’s a fuzzy distinction at times. Prior to Hennessy’s win, the Best Writing XYZZY went to Porpentine for three years running.)

Birdland has been mentioned on RPS a couple of times before in round-ups, but it deserves a fuller discussion. It’s Twine, but with an unusual format; it’s a lesbian YA romance; and it’s an exploration of how teenagers learn to define their personalities, expressed through the medium of game stats. It’s charming and polished enough that you don’t have to work too hard to get into it, but there’s enough there to support further thought. You don’t feel like you have to play it more than once to get a good experience, but there’s plenty to reward you if you do. Birdland demands little and yet offers much, which is a rare accomplishment for any kind of art.

First, about that format, which might seem like the least important detail: Birdland is a pretty long game as Twine games go, and Hennessy has gone out of his way to make sure that it provides hooks so that you can put it aside and come back, or return to chapters midway through if you’d like to replay.

This helpful feature subtly alters the relationship between player and game. A lot of Twine pieces make no concessions of this kind: there’s nothing to tell you how long the game will last, no method of saving partway through, no overview of the game’s structure, no opportunity to navigate according to your own preferences or even to know what kind of shape you’re going to navigate. You submit yourself to the experience when you enter. That sensation of constraint can be very powerful — My Father’s Long, Long Legs, for instance, is effective partly because you don’t know exactly how long it’s going to last. But Birdland is more generous with the player. You can go back if you need to, start over, get a look at the shape of the story. It’s fine.

But when I think about it, I’m not really surprised that Birdland inspires that kind of fandom. It is not only that there’s such a paucity of lesbian YA material, especially where the characters are given the chance of a happy ending. It’s also that Birdland is character-centric in a way unusual even for Twine IF. Almost everything is delivered as dialogue, in a pseudo play format. Bridget gets many scenes with each of her friends, so there’s time enough for emotional connections to build. Every critical moment of the plot involves other people and how you’re relating to them.

Meanwhile, if you like a particular scene – if you want to replay the romantic tension from a slightly different angle, if you want to hear more and other jokes from those same characters you’re getting to know – Birdland‘s chapter structure means you can revisit that moment easily. There’s far more potential dialogue in each scene than you can see in one playthrough. At the same time, Birdland isn’t a dating sim. There’s one single love interest for Bridget, which means that the story can be written to strongly support and develop that relationship, rather than hold multiple relationships in potential.

All of that would be of slight value if the writing weren’t so good. His characters have their own personalities, but they all speak in a way that is unmistakably Hennessyian and often wickedly funny. His humor often points out the unfair or the ridiculous, but it never reads as mean-spirited; and his punchlines sneak up on you so fast you’re laughing before you know what happened. Replaying for this article, I may have startled the neighbors.

Finally, there’s the deployment of stats. The structure of Birdland is as follows: each night you have a dream in which birds ask you how to behave in various scenarios. You may do whatever you like, but your choices set your personality stats for the waking life episodes that follow. During the “day” sections, where you play Bridget interacting at camp, you often encounter choices that are unavailable, crossed out because they don’t fit the personality you’re currently performing. Nonetheless, that personality is itself something you’ve constructed — and unlike the constructed personalities in a Choice of Games piece or a typical CRPG, you’re not stuck with the decisions you made at the outset. You can change your personality profile over and over again every night. It’s a beautiful conceit, one that takes the player’s roleplaying mechanic and turns it into an expression of the protagonist’s roleplaying.

[Disclosures: Emily Short has eaten dinner with Brendan Patrick Hennessy. She has also won some XYZZY awards. More generally, Emily is not a journalist by trade and works professionally with various interactive fiction publishers. You can find out more about her commercial affiliations at her website.]

So an LGBT young adult game won a gaming award. If that’s not a good sign for the gamer scene I don’t know (even if only a very small faction of said scene is represented here). Congratulations to Mr. Hennessy!

Personally, I’m not so sure if this is up my alley, though. The innovative use of stats sure sounds appealing, but this would be more to my liking if the YA theme had been combined with some more traditional gaming subjects, as, for example, in “Life is Strange”.

Of course that would probably be very much contrary to what the author wanted to achieve…

I’m not normally one for dismissing formats, content is king. However, despite trying a number of times I just *cannot stand* Twine. At all. It always just feels like reading through a badly done Powerpoint presentation

Given the ones I’ve tried have been mostly award winners or nominees, I’m pretty sure they were the cream of the crop. Also, it’s the format I don’t like, so I don’t think the “right” content can make a difference.

I love to read, I read every day. I just really don’t like reading in the twine format.

Are you really saying you do not like twine texts due to the way they are presented? I mean, would you like them if they were hardcopies or presented as clickable post it notes? Do you also dislike some books solely because they are only available as paperback or due to the font used? That’s a wee bit eccentric, don’t you think? Or is it the CYOA format you generally don’t like? I really don’t get it.

To a degree, yes. There are some Twine texts that I would probably enjoy reading if they were available as hard copies. Avoiding paperbacks would be silly, as it’s a standard format for books. However, in theory, there are ways a book could be printed that would put me off – e.g. a particularly unpleasant font that made it hard to read, or if it was printed as light blue text on a pink background, or there was a slight pause at the end of each page or paragraph before you could continue reading (somehow). In practice, I’ve never encountered a book that did these things.

Also, I’m probably never going to be a big fan of CYOA games in general, especially the way they’re represented in Twine games. It’s Interactive Fiction with a small i, it tries to combine 2 things and ends up doing both badly. It’s too restrictive to enjoy as a game, and too slow and clunky to enjoy as a reading format.

I don’t think that is “eccentric”, a little curmudgeonly maybe, but I’m old and I’ve been playing games for a very long time, so I think I’ve earned the right to be picky. Horses for courses and all that.

Usually I tend to avoid romance in stories, but I enjoyed the one in Birdland a lot. I doubt I would have played it had I known it had a YA-romance thread to it, but I’m very glad I did. This was one case where the occasionally-infuriating “I’m going to recommend this without telling you anything” worked perfectly. Also, yes, it is very funny. And for personal plus points, it involves sailing.
I’ve not replayed it though – I feel like that would break the spell or something.

I second the replay thing. While major fans might enjoy replaying it to get every angle on the characters, to a certain extent replaying choice-based IF like this breaks the magic. The game gives the illusion that the plot could go in nearly unlimited ways based on your choices, but of course the writer can’t actually write all of those… if you replay it you lose the suspension of disbelief and it isn’t quite as cool.

(I think the author of The Sea Will Claim Everything had a warning along these lines at the start of a short choice-based IF he wrote, too… replaying once or twice can be cool, but if you exhaustively replay every possibility you’re going to strip the magic out of it, like walking onto the stage so you can see that everything’s just a set.)

I’m really happy RPS has an IF column now. I haven’t played any text adventures since the days of Infocom and Level 9, so it’s neat catching up on what has happened in the last (urgh) 30 years. I just played Birdland. The hypertext approach doesn’t feel much like the text adventures of yore, but it was definitely a lot less frustrating. And having the game kick off in your browser is a wonderfully low barrier for entry.

I didn’t really experience the story as a romance at all. None of the characters (including the protagonist) really stood out as strong personalities to me, so I didn’t become emotionally invested. But I really enjoyed the madcap absurdity of it all, and laughed out loud in a few places. If anything I think this was a sweet surreal comedy, and pleasantly Canadian to boot. Something to hold me over till the next Kentucky Route Zero chapter comes out.

Who knows, maybe having dipped my toe in today will get me back into the medium for real? Thanks for the column, in any case.

Whilst the lack of physical awards trinkets nowadays is perfectly understandable I think the XYZZY’s could do with having a smidge better communication with their nominees, the lovely Secret Agent Cinder got the best multimedia award and the author didn’t even know they’d been nominated until about a week afterwards.

I don’t usually like IF all that much, a lot of them seem samey to me. However, Birdland was really really really good. A part of me wonders if you can lose in the THRILLING CLIMAX, but another part of me doesn’t want to know and just be satisfied in my knowledge that I outsmarted the foe